and jon, you've been digging into what's been going on behind the scenes here and you told me, you have the president and republican house speaker john boehner actually close to a deal and then what happened? >> reporter: that's right. they were both ready to at least begin talking about this big deal, but what happened is, speaker boehner faced the opposition, not only from tea party members of congress, but from his own leadership. eric cantor, the number two republican in the house, actually told him point blank that he would not support such a big deal if it included anything that could be called tax increases. and cantor said, not only will you not have his support, but he would lose many, many republicans in the house. >> and jon, it was not only eric cantor on the republican side, but nancy pelosi on the democratic side giving the president trouble. >> reporter: yeah, absolutely. and i've spoken to a lot of top democratic leaders about this. former speaker pelosi made it clear that she was not going to support anything that would touch medicare or social security. and the reason